Alstom Grid presents a vision of the future at Smart Grid Paris

06/06/2013

4th – 6th June, Alstom Grid took part in Smart Grid Paris as strategic sponsor. Delphine Batho, French Minister for Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy attended the event to present the “Smart Awards” and visited the Alstom booth.

Smart grids efficiently integrate both renewable and traditional energy sources to supply consumers with a greener, more reliable source of electricity. While governments around the world are opting for smart grid solutions, the scale and the challenges involved are particular to each nation and network.

On Tuesday 4th, Grégoire Poux-Guillaume, Alstom Grid President, gave the keynote session in which he reinforced Alstom’s commitment to the global energy transition, citing examples such as the IssyGrid and Nice Grid smart cities in France.

He highlighted how these projects are driven by necessity, both by utility customers and consumers themselves. “The value of the Smart Grid”, said Poux-Guillaume, “is about doing more with less of the planet’s resources: lowering carbon emissions, creating more reliable energy and harnessing the intermittent power of renewable energy sources.”

Patrick Plas, Senior Vice-President for Grid Automation and Power Electronics, and Laurent Schmitt, Vice-President Smart Grid, joined panel sessions respectively on the topics of Supergrids and the evolution of the Smart Grid as an industrial sector. The Supergrids panel was chaired by Ana Aguado Cornago, CEO of the FOSG (Friends of the Supergrid), a group dedicated to promoting and influencing the policy and regulatory framework required to enable large-scale interconnection in Europe.

Throughout the three-day event, Alstom Grid also participated in project sessions to share experience on running Smart Grid projects and presented various pilot and commercial projects including NiceGrid, TWENTIES, Poste Intelligent, Reflexe and Eco2charge, as well as IssyGrid and COOPERATE through joint venture company EMBIX. IssyGrid and Nice Grid both won Smart Awards, in the categories of “Smart City” and “Smart Networks”.

Delphine Batho, French Minister for Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy